At home and at work, the force behind TV’s The Mindy Project prizes colorful creativity. “I’m a ‘more is more’ person,” she says. Watch exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of her photo shoot and read the Parade cover story below.

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On a late summer Saturday afternoon, Mindy Kaling is removing her hair extensions and stacking them on her dining room table. She has spent the past several hours looking glamorous and windswept for Parade’s photo shoot at her Los Angeles home, and now she’s getting comfortable. So off come the precariously high heels and the lush extensions, which added a little extra oomph to the star’s already enviable glossy black hair. “I hope I’m not grossing you out right now,” she says, unclipping another piece and adding it to the pile.

Who can blame her for wanting to let her (extra) hair down? It’s a rarity these days for Kaling, who’s working overtime as the creator, head writer, and star of The Mindy Project, now in its second season on Fox. The series revolves around Mindy Lahiri, a rom-com–obsessed ob-gyn with a messy personal life, and it is, much like Kaling herself, a whip-smart and hilarious critical darling. Which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed the 34-year-old multitasker’s career. In the eight years since she made her TV debut as gossipy customer-service rep Kelly Kapoor on The Office, Kaling has racked up six Emmy nominations for her writing and producing work on that show; been featured in hit films, including This Is the End and The 40-Year-Old Virgin; written a best-seller, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns); and amassed more than 2.5 million followers on Twitter, where she posts witty quips on everything from Woody Allen to the old-fashioned pleasures of gardening.

Her schedule is so full that “I feel like I spend more time in my car than in my house,” she says, only half- joking. Kaling bought her three-bedroom, 1927 Spanish-style abode six years ago from Michael Schur, a fellow former Office writer who went on to cocreate Parks and Recreation. “I just fell in love with it,” she remembers of walking through the front door the first time. “I could immediately picture living here.”

She wasted little time in making her first house feel as vibrant and creative as its owner. With help from interior designer Ariel Ashe, the sister-in-law of Saturday Night Live vet Seth Meyers, Kaling filled the space with a chic mix of furnishings and eclectic decorative details, like the artfully carved (and large enough to sit on) wooden dice in one of the front rooms, or the framed faux magazine cover featuring, and signed by, Conan O’Brien, which rests on an Art Deco–inspired accent table in a bathroom. The sunny dining room, the house’s centerpiece, is spacious but intimate thanks to its bold use of color and sophisticated prints. The dozen chairs are upholstered in complementary Missoni fabrics, and the gray-blue walls, a paint suggestion by Ashe, originally “scared” Kaling but now she loves them.

Instead of filling the room’s built-in corner shelves with designer trinkets, Kaling opted for sentimental touches like framed photos of family and friends, including college pals from Dartmouth and her ex-boyfriend/current best guy friend B. J. Novak, who played Kelly’s on-off beau, Ryan, on The Office. The house’s overall vibe is “playful, colorful,” and, Kaling adds with a laugh, “a little not-grown-up.” She has hosted only one dinner party here, a lively gathering for her Mindy Project writing staff shortly before work began on the series’ first season. “By evening’s end,” she recalls, snacking on a crudités platter from the photo shoot, “I felt like King Arthur, and the table was my group of rambunctious knights.” She’s not likely to put her sleek state-of-the-art kitchen to frequent use anytime soon. “If you’re in your 30s and busy achieving your professional goals, you’re like, ‘Why is cooking important?’” she says, dipping a veggie into the hot sauce she’s just retrieved from her fridge. But she understands the appeal: “You go to someone’s house for a home-cooked meal and you think, ‘Oh, I get it—the most attractive you can be, male or female, is if you cook.’

“If I had a boyfriend who cooked for me,” adds the currently single star, “that’d be it. I would never stray.”

The daughter of Indian parents who immigrated to the U.S. in 1977, Kaling moved often around the Boston area while growing up, thanks to her father Avu’s career as an architect. “He always wanted to have a project,” she says, “so I lived in all kinds of different places”—from modest apartments to grand houses with enough bathrooms that she didn’t have to share with her brother, Vijay, now a financial analyst.

But it was another space, the office of her mother, Swati—an ob-gyn with sharp senses of both humor and style, who was an inspiration for Kaling’s Mindy Project character—where the young Saturday Night Live and Kids in the Hall fan nurtured her dream of becoming a comedy writer. “There was a little room where patients got blood drawn,” she recalls. “It was full of medical posters, and there was a plastic replica of the uterus. It was not at all a room built for children, but it had a little desk and typewriter, and I would just sit and write. If someone needed blood drawn, I was shooed out.”

Education was highly prized in her household. “We were supposed to be very studious and observant and helpful,” says Kaling, whose idea of rebellion was staying up late to read by flashlight. “The expectation was not that I would be entertained by anybody but that I would come up with my own entertainment.” It’s a notion she has made a hallmark of her career. In 2001, she and her friend Brenda Withers wrote Matt & Ben, a fictionalized take on two other BFFs, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, during the Good Will Hunting era; it became an off-Broadway smash (Withers played Damon and Kaling was Affleck). The play earned her an interview with Greg Daniels, an executive producer of The Office, and her success on that show, in turn, paved the way for Kaling to create her own series.

Last year, Kaling’s mother died of pancreatic cancer on the same day Fox green-lighted the Mindy Project pilot. The timing, she believes, was no accident. “It was like a gift from God or my mom,” says Kaling, whose home is filled with reminders of her biggest cheerleader and closest confidante. “I think she was giving me something so I didn’t have to get crushed under the weight of my grief.”

If Kaling is full of opinions—and she is—she credits that trait to her mother as well. This afternoon, she sounds off on everything from her distaste for leftovers (“Once something has stayed for a day in my fridge, I’m like, ‘Yuck. Get a life, Mindy, don’t eat this two days in a row’”) to the attention she receives for standing out in the white male–dominated comedy world. “There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them,” she says. “But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art.”

And don’t even get her started on the attention paid to her appearance. “I always get asked, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’” she says. “I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, ‘You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?’”

Fortunately, Kaling has little time to dwell on such matters; she’s got a TV show to produce and a staff to manage. “I love being the boss,” she says, “but it’s lonelier because you know that everyone at some point has huge complaints about you. And I like to be part of the gang, you know?” Soon, she’ll have even more on her plate: She’s signed on to voice a character in the Pixar film Inside Out, and she’s writing another book. She has also bought her next home, “a dilapidated teardown in the hills that I plan on gutting and slowly rebuilding,” she says. “It’s going to take a few years.” A mega-mansion is not what she’s after, though: “I don’t want to have a house so big that you don’t know when your kids have come home.”

Or when your dad is dropping by for a visit. As Kaling wraps up her interview, her father, who’s building a house not far from here, is in her front yard, watering the lawn. The two have been collaborating on some landscaping on her property. There are roses that need to be tended, and she’s ready to roll up her sleeves.